There is often a need to guide an item on a predetermined path along a substrate for various applications; for example, cutting, gluing, welding, riveting, marking, paint, inspecting, sewing and 3D printing.
Guiding an item, such as a needle, on a desired path along a substrate is particularly significant for materials such as textiles. Known systems and methods suffer from several shortcomings. For example, they require a lot of manual intervention. Further, they may require that the path to be followed actually be on the substrate. In addition, the known systems and methods may be limited to certain styles, patterns and depth of substrates. In addition, they do not provide real-time, self-correction for correcting the position of the item when it gets off the desired path along a substrate.
Therefore, there is a need to improve systems and methods for guiding an item on a desired path along a substrate, such as a sheet of textile material.